Last updated: November 24, 2023

Keeping membership data and information up to date can be difficult, especially as your association grows and changes.
As your memberships grow, there are more payments, renewals, and exit dates to keep track of.

Investing in automating your association’s memberships is important to your association since it can help you manage your memberships in a quick and simple way.

It also saves time and money, which can be put towards other important tasks within your association. Wondering how? Read on to explore.

Key Takeaways

• Automating reminder emails helps you remind current members of their renewal dates, which will help you retain them.
• Investing in an automated system that emails members and alerts them of the events you are hosting can increase engagement.
• Automated membership profiles often come with the ability to start emails with member’s names, making your communications even more personal.
• An automated membership process saves you time and money by putting all your workflows on one platform.

1. Improve Member Retention

While acquisition is important, member retention can prove to be even more valuable.

According to the Harvard Business School study, profits increase from 25% to 95% if customer retention rates increase by a mere 5%. It is also estimated that 80% of a company’s revenue will come from 20% of its existing customers.

Thus, your association can only have so many members, so it is imperative to maintain good relationships with those you already have. Automating your membership profiles can help you increase your retention rates.

Additionally, exit and renewal dates can be difficult to keep track of: both for your consumer and for your association.

Automating reminder emails helps you remind current members of their renewal dates, which will help you retain them.
This saves you and your team time and energy that can be invested in fostering positive engagement with your members.

2. Enhance Membership Engagement

Keeping your members engaged can be difficult.

Although this is true, membership engagement and retention go hand in hand. If your members feel that they are not benefitting from what your association has to offer, they’re more likely to leave.

You actually may have lots to offer but how you present that information matters?

It’s not practical to expect your association’s members to check your website for new events or workshops, especially with their busy schedules. Engaged members are also expected to be more profitable.

According to a Gallup study, fully engaged members represent an average 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared with the average customer.

Instead of having your members come to you, you should come to them.

Investing in an automated system that emails members and alerts them of the events you are hosting can increase engagement. It makes it easier for them to see your content and for you to get their attention.

Not to mention the time you saved by automating rather than sending those emails by hand!

For more tips on how to improve membership engagement, check out our post, 6 Ways to Boost Your Association’s Membership Engagement.

3. Show Your Commitment to Your Members

Although being able to reach out to your members is important, simply doing so is not enough.
With the average office worker receiving around 121 emails a day, you need to be able to stick out and communicate your message to your members.

With your members receiving this number of emails, you want to be able to show your association’s dedication to your individual members. You can do this through email personalization.

A study by Experian found that personalized emails are opened 29% more often than non-personalized emails. They also have a click-through rate that is 41% higher than non-personalized emails.

With this in mind, it’s clear that you cannot rely on generic emails to grab your members’ attention.

The personalization of emails can make a world of difference when it comes to your campaigns. It can lead to better engagement and retention of members.

While personalizing emails may seem difficult and daunting, much-automated membership software is capable of helping you with this task as well!

You can access different templates that make your emails look unique and professional.

Automated membership profiles often come with the ability to start emails with member’s names, making your communications even more personal.

4. Reduce Costs

Running an association can be a costly endeavor.

From operational costs to time itself, you have to spend something in order to run your association.

Some of these costs arise in the way you handle your memberships.

• Do you keep paper records of your memberships?
• Do you spend a lot of time updating membership data?

The time and resources spent on accomplishing these things can be put into other tasks. Cutting down on this time can help you focus on other work that can help your association grow.

Membership automation saves you time and money by putting all your membership-related activities on one platform.

Members’ information can be updated system-wide with a few clicks, you can create marketing emails to alert members of events and much more on one system.

An automated system would put an end to window-hopping for information.

You and your team will also spend less time generating renewal emails that can be sent out automatically with an automated system.

5. Conduct Analysis to Improve Your Association

Sometimes it can feel like your association or business is stuck in a rut. You may be having trouble planning your next move.
Even if your association is doing well, it doesn’t hurt to examine the ways in which you can improve and plan ahead accordingly for the future.

This can be done by analyzing your members and what they want out of you as a company.

One McKinsey study states that intensive users of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to clearly outperform their competitors in terms of new-customer acquisition than non-intensive users, and nine times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty.

With this in mind, automating your association membership can provide you with an analysis of what works for your customers and what doesn’t.

• Who contributes the most profit overtime and who doesn’t?
• What grabs your members’ interest?
• What events do they like and can you duplicate that in the future?

These are some questions that data and analytics can help you answer and improve your association’s membership retention and engagement.

On top of this, you can discover what strategies are giving you problems and correct them accordingly, increasing members’ satisfaction in your association.

6. Overall Convenient for Both the Customer and the Employee

Time is of the essence of whether you are a growing or starting organization.

Your members want to be able to navigate through your platform with ease and speed. The last thing they want to receive is pesky emails or phone calls asking if their information is up to date.

They want to be able to update their information with a click of a button whenever the time comes.

Whether it is updating the type of membership they want or changing their payment plans, customers want to be able to focus that time and effort on more important tasks.

Today, it’s all about delivering a stellar member experience.

With dedicated community software, your members can have their questions answered faster and receive information tailored to them.

When you adopt the right technology, you'll not only free up your teams from process-heavy tasks, but you'll also have more time to connect with your members.

Automation across sales, service, and marketing will free your employees so they can spend more time talking to prospective customers and strengthening relationships with existing ones, helping your business to continue moving forward.

7. Automate Member Communications

Sending timely and relevant communications to your members is critical for engagement and retention. However, coordinating email campaigns, newsletters, renewal notices, and more puts a strain on your staff.

Automation software can schedule and deploy customized communications based on triggers like join dates, birthdays, and renewal cycles.

This reduces manual tasks so staff can focus on creating compelling content. It also ensures consistency in messaging across channels, for example:

• Automated welcome campaigns make new members feel valued while introducing them to key offerings.
• Event reminders get more members to register and attend.
• Renewal nudges reduce churn by keeping members engaged.
• Workflows can even track email engagement data to see which messages resonate. This allows associations to continually refine communications for optimal relevance.

8. Create a Central Database of Information

Automation platforms integrate directly with CRM to create a centralized database of member information.

This data can then power intelligent segmentation for hyper-targeted communications.

You can gain rich insights into member demographics, behaviors, and preferences to inform engagement strategies.

• Built-in analytics provide real-time tracking of email campaigns and landing pages to see open/click rates.
• You can quickly identify high-value content as well as any messaging misfires.
• Member website activity also gets monitored to guide personalized recommendations for each individual.

These data-driven insights help you to continually optimize programming and services to better meet member needs.

Start Automating Your Membership Management With Glue Up’s All-In-One Solution

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The modern association exists in a world that has access to ever-changing and improving technologies. Why not use them to your advantage?

Automating your memberships can lead to many benefits for your association as a whole. First and foremost, automation can help you with the task of keeping members happy and satisfied.

It provides a firsthand look into what your members want, what catches their attention, and how you can improve to suit their interests. Not to mention how you can reduce costs when you switch to an all-encompassing system. With these things in mind, consider automating your memberships! You never know how your association may grow.

Interested in automating your membership management? Book a demo today to learn more about how Glue Up can drive more value for members and power the mission of your association.